Your profitability is a top priority for us at Cisco. In fact, we are increasing our investments in our partner incentive and profitability programs in Fiscal Year 2012 to help you not only drive profitable growth, but also to evolve your businesses.

With your input, we frequently refine our incentive and profitability programs to help you stay at the forefront of the industry and enhance your relevancy to customers. FY12 is no exception. Here’s a list of what’s new.

• We are rolling out the Teaming Incentive Program (TIP) globally to offer Cisco partners an opportunity to realize higher margins in deals where they team with Cisco.

• We are streamlining the Opportunity Incentive Program (OIP) to make it easier and faster for partners to receive approval on deal registration, and therefore, boost adoption and opportunity for higher margins for partners.

• We are simplifying the Technology Migration Program (TMP) and expanding competitive trade-in product recognition for easier quoting purposes.

• We are adding incentives to the recently announced Cisco Cloud Partner Program to help partners monetize the rapidly growing cloud market opportunities.

• We are building new incentives, which will be announced later in FY12, to reward our partners for actively participating in the new Partner Led go-to-market model.

• We are refreshing our ground breaking profitability program – the Cisco Value Incentive Program (VIP) – to meet changing customer and market demands and ultimately to help partners successfully evolve their practices as the industry moves forward.Read More »

Once again, Joe Panettieri, MSP Mentor blogger and Editorial Director, featured another Cisco partner in his FastChat series, which centers on moving from managed to cloud services. This time around, Joe chatted with Vince Conroy, CTO of FusionStorm.

During their discussion, Vince talked about where FusionStorm is headed in the cloud services market, and he offered up some best practice advice for resellers who are formulating strategies for managed and cloud services.

Watch Vince’s interview below to hear all the details.

So, what’s FusionStorm’s focus? The company just recently launched a new, cloud-based hosting service in which customers can run applications in a hosted, private cloud. These private clouds are set up in one of six FusionStorm data centers.

If you are looking to break into the managed and cloud services market, Vince offers this bit of advice:

Nothing like a fantastic performance from the Soul Rebels and the Mardi Gras Indians to kick things off here at Partner Summit 2011! The band played a rousing set as partners streamed in to hear Cisco CEO John Chambers, Senior Vice President Keith Goodwin, Senior Vice President Edison Peres and COO Gary Moore address the audience.

Keith opened the event, welcoming both the in-person attendees as well as the scores attending virtually via Virtual Partner Summit. Keith remarked that at Partner Summit 2011—the 15th Partner Summit thus far—the theme is “Impact,” which is all about making a difference in how together with our partners we can impact customers, impact each other’s business, impact industry, and impact education, healthcare, and economic development. Keith also talked about Cisco’s need to simplify, and become easier to do business with for partners.

John Chambers then took the stage, revving up partners with the statistic that $170 billion of products and services are out there as an opportunity for partners, and that “market transitions wait for no one.” According to John, going forward, we need to invest in what we can do together, while also thinking about how we evolve. John also said that as we move from an information economy to a networked economy, the intelligence in the network is fueling the next generation of productivity and bringing opportunity to our partners.

John then emphasized that technology architectures represent a big opportunity and separate our partners from the competition. John finished his talk by stating that Cisco is focused on helping partners grow their top-line and bottom line.

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